Shadow over Gotham
by my-echo
Summary: Hot breath at my ear…and another smell. Cakey, bitter. Like dried paint. “Been a while, hasn’t it…sa-wee-t-heart,” the assailant mutters against my skin, his voice like a snake’s kiss, and I remember—I know this voice. I know it.


**A/N: This fic, in which the Joker runs into an old girlfriend from the days before he took on the persona, has been gathering dust on my hard drive for a while. Having just recently watched The Dark Knight again, I took on a fresh inspiration for it and finally got it finished. **

**FYI - before you get the idea that this is one of those fics where you learn all about the Joker, think again. There are hints of backstory, of course, owing to the subject matter, but only hints - and incredibly bare-boned at that. I've always loved the way he was portrayed in the film - you literally know nothing about this man, beyond what you see. And it makes him all the more frightening, unpredictable, and dangerous.**

**The nuances of Heath!Joker's speech are incredibly difficult to capture in writing, and it took me a while to get right - even now, the perfectionist in me insists it could be better, but I think I did the absolute best I could. **

**And, one final note: this is rated M for a reason. This is not for the incredibly squeamish. (No, I'm not talking about blood and guts. Something else, but I'd rather not give it away.)**

* * *

I feel the heartthrob of the city, feel it in my bones. It has a dark taste to it, flawed and dangerous, but seductive. It pulls me through the dim streets like a lover, beckoning me to its obscure bed. What will I find if I dare to traverse its deepest parts, all dirty alleys and crumbling corners?

My shoes click on cement, the underground parking garage. It's only a brief wondering which has me stymied, a silly notion, a fatalistic impulse. I wouldn't really go into the black heart of Gotham, unless I were invincible. No one with half a brain—who wasn't God or a criminal, that is—would.

A flash beside me…then a smell. It's familiar, that smell—something male, almost feral. And then I feel a knife at my throat, and all reason throbs away behind the burning acid of my panic, my body reduced to a rigid ramrod of quivering flesh.

Hot breath at my ear…and another smell. Cakey, bitter. Like dried paint.

"Been a _while_,hasn't it…sa-_wee-t-_heart," the assailant mutters against my skin, his voice like a snake's kiss, and I remember—I know this voice. I know it, somehow, just like the smell beyond the paint. But the memory is dull, blurry at the edges, and my mind hasn't yet formed a coherent image to match the other senses.

"Didja _miss_ me, 'Melia?" says the voice, and it's driving me mad, how I know that deep nasal whine, that quirky little twist to the words…I know it, I _know_ it…

"Always liked that name," he continues, smacking his lips a little. "Aaa-_melia._" Gives a little giggle, and then I know for sure with a whip-crack of revelation.

"Johnny," I whisper, almost a whimper. "Johnny, oh my _God…_what…I thought you…"

He laughs delightedly now, and whips me around roughly to face him in the dark, a little bit of light glinting off the blade. My breath hitches—the knife is still there, so dangerously close. God, I hate knives, I always have, he _knows_ I hate them…

"Pretty spectacular little, umm, accident. My death," he says, his voice sounding like some ghastly grin in the shadows. I can't see him yet, it's too dark, and the light is in all the wrong places. "All staged. Fooled everybody, didn't it." He sounds morbidly proud.

"Why? Why'd you do it?" I ask, although I think I already know why.

He sighs. "D'ya _have_ to ask, dollface?"

"Why are you here now, Johnny?" I whisper, wanting to cry. My Johnny, my brutal tortured one, who always played everything so close to the edge, as though he were skating on a razor-blade. Alive, alive. "And what's with the knife? You _know_—"

"But that's _why_, A_mel-_ia," he murmurs. "'Cause you hate 'em. I _like_ a little fear. Kinda…gives me confidence. Makes me feel like a…a real, um…" More thoughtful lip-smacking. "Man."

"You're crazy," I whisper, and I fear he really is. Any vestiges of sanity that might have remained have withered in the last decade, crumpled like paper and tossed into the wastebasket. He was always a little strange, but I can sense it more deeply in him now, like a burn-mark on solid steel.

"Naaah," he drawls, his voice lazy and unconcerned, but I remember the nuances of his speech now like we were kids together yesterday, and I can hear the subtle undertone of roiling, barely controlled rage just beneath the surface. It's floating there, suspended between the surface and the sea bottom, just hanging…waiting to strike.

"It was an expression," I say quickly, remembering how quickly his temper could erupt in the old days, and noting the gleaming curve of the knife so close to my throat. The blade sits flat and relatively loose upon my shoulder, the sharp point tickling my collarbone, the handle gripped tightly in his warm hand. Cold and lifeless, this deadly work of art, this shimmering instrument of fatality. "I don't really think you're crazy, Johnny…I never did." The words come out in a gasp, more desperate and forced than I meant to make them sound.

He giggles again, incredulously, sounding like a complete lunatic, and a bolt of ice shoots through my veins. He'd kill me, I know it now, without compunction if he really wanted to. I always knew the capability was there, even if it was just barely caged and maintained, but somewhere between the time that I knew him last and the time of this, our re-meeting, he set it free, broke the locks that held it captive. The wild beast, the raging bull. The rabid wolf.

"Johnny, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean for it all to happen the way it did—"

"But it _DID, _Amel-ia," he snaps dangerously, and I begin to feel more threads of panic, because his control is disappearing. "It _did, _princess. And then when you all thought I was gone, _dead and buried, _did ya ever stop to maybe…_think_ a little? Think, wow, Johnny's a pretty, uh…smart kid. He could have pulled it off, no problem. He might _not actually be dead._"

"Why would I?" I gasp out. "It was _too_ smart. Like you said. It fooled everyone. Even me. And personally," I snap, suddenly feeling shards of molten anger break through the ice of fear, "I think you _wanted _it that way. You wanted it, Johnny, or you would have contacted me. Somehow. You wouldn't have waited ten years to tell me you were alive."

He sighs again, and I feel the shift of his body through his hands, jerky and puppet-like. He tilts his head—all I can see of it is yet a shadow—and tightens his grip on the knife.

"Are you going to kill me now?" I whisper, not sure whether to hold back the burning tears behind my eyes or let them run free. Would it make him angry, to see me cry, or would it placate him? I don't know. I can't know, anymore. This is a new Johnny, with freshly unpredictable facets to him that I don't even want to explore.

He stays silent, but the knife floats just a little closer to my jaw.

"What do you _want?_" My voice is becoming embarrassingly transparent, emotional.

There's a hiss of breath in the shadows that obscure his face. "Huh," he says. "That's a good question. Wha-t…do _I…_want?" And his other hand, the one that's not holding the knife, starts to feel its way around my face, about as gently as a bull bursting into a china shop. His thumb grazes my bottom lip roughly, and his fingers knead my skin, feel my forehead and hairline. "Maybe I just want a little…hmm…a little closure," he muses, his voice sparking and falling like some crazed firecracker. "Maybe I just wanted to say hel-_lo._ Or _maybe…_" His hand tightens at the nape of my neck, grasping my hair in a tight, painful hold. "I _have no motive._" He giggled. "I'm like the wind, sweet-heart. I goeth where I lisst-eth, or whatever the f—"

"Johnny, let me see you," I demand suddenly, and he bends my neck backwards, making a noise in the back of his throat.

"I don't _think_ so," he snaps, his voice a low, vicious song. "Little 'Melia wouldn't wanna see her Johnny now. Johnny's _changed_ a lot, see. He's all…uh…" He giggled again, but it sounded strained this time. "Uh…_mutilated._"

"Huh?" I query dumbly, and he pricks into my skin with the knife, right where the jaw meets the throat. I can feel the tiny trickle, and the stinging pain, and I close my eyes, feeling the idiotic urge to cry again.

"Maybe I could make you just like me," he whispers. "A freak. Maybe _I_ could make _you_ understand what this…decade…has done to me. What it's meant for my il-lus-trious career."

"Johnny," I beg. "Just put the knife away, okay? Please?"

He thinks for a moment, and then, on a seeming whim, puts his hands up in a conciliatory gesture, snapping the knife back into its fold, stowing it like a magician on some unknown hiding place on his body. Too quick for my eyes to see.

I can hardly believe he actually did it, but I start to feel a kind of deep, shivering trepidation about what's going to come next. For all I know, it could be something much worse than the knife. Far be it from me to be privy to the workings of his troubled mind.

Make that a sick mind. It used to be troubled, when I knew him before. Now it's sick.

"'Melia," he says conversationally, making that weird little smacking noise with his tongue again, "I think I _know _what I want." His words are drawling, oddly drawn-out, as though a short sentence could take forever. My hands are shaking. I clench them into fists.

"Okay, Johnny," I whisper. "Okay, what…what do you—"

He lunges forward and kisses me before I can react, before I can move, but this isn't really a kiss. It's something mocking, something bestial. His mouth tastes of bitter paint, crumbling and slick, and stale, slimy saliva. _Oral rape,_ my mind screams, and I almost choke on his tongue. It's almost impossible for me to breathe. Whatever is on his face is getting smeared all over me, acrid and alkaline in my nostrils. He giggles into my mouth, Eau de Madness.

My back slams uncomfortably against the dirty floor of the parking garage. He starts ripping the buttons off my blouse. "Been a while," he whispers violently, grinning at me, and I can suddenly see his teeth in the dim light, yellow and vaguely rotten-looking.

"Johnny—" I croak, but he takes my jaw in his hand, squeezing my lips together like a fish. "Don't," he says between his teeth, "_talk._" He clacks his teeth together once, and his tongue darts quickly around his mouth. I can see a little better now, dimly, white smudges of paint on his face, stark as a ghost, hollow black raccoon circles around his eyes. Something red, smeared like childishly applied lipstick over his mouth and cheeks—is that…? No. I didn't taste any blood, thank God—it must have been paint, only paint, only paint—

I want to ask him why, but he told me not to talk. Nothing could be worse than this, could it, forced into silence under sick, coppery fear, when words are waiting to burst free from my tongue at any moment, struggling to break their weak bonds and fly into his face.

"I'm gonna do it, 'Melia, I'm gonna do it, and it's gonna be…pretty good. I think," he croons into my ear. His breath is hot, panting. "Yeah. You're gonna like it, aren't you? You're gonna like it, after all this time—"

"Johnny, shut up," I snap, and then I could just about kill myself. His head snaps to attention, shakes a little, eyes wide in mock consternation. "Woo-ha-HA!" he says. "Now…" More lip-smacking, "I dis_tinct_ly remember that I made it clear about your little jabbering mouth, pea-pod. It _ruins_—" He tears the sleeves from my shoulders in a few violent rips. "the—" He shoves up my skirt. "_at-mos-phere-uh._" That last part is a growl, made worse by his lips pulling up over his teeth. Something inexplicable and disconcerting is at the corners of his mouth, something I can't quite make out yet, something I don't think I even want to see.

He grabs one of my breasts, squeezes it so hard I want to scream. All that comes out is a faint whimper. "Oh, yeah," he says. "That's nice. That bra looks _expensive_, too…aw, whoops." He takes the knife and cuts the tiny connecting strip in the middle. "Hmm…" he sighs as the cups fall open. Rather than following some primal instinct to cross my arms, I just close my eyes and pretend I'm in the middle of some god-awful nightmare. Resistance is futile. Maybe it'll all be over in three minutes or less. Maybe I'll wake up naked in the parking garage with nothing to show for it but slick thighs, a tattered blouse and a ruined bra. Please let it be that simple.

I feel vaguely as though I'm striking some kind of blow against women's rights, but honestly, right now I don't give a shit. As long as he doesn't kill me, I'll be okay. I'll be okay.

"They got bigger, I think," he says musingly. "You get implants, or you just a late bloomer?"

I am mute. I don't think, I don't feel. I don't talk. If I don't move or speak, maybe he won't kill me. Maybe he'll just do his business and go away.

"Hey," he whispers, and smacks me a little on the cheek. "I'm _talkin'_ to you, 'Meeelia." His mouth pops open at the end of my name, hanging, dangling, his eyes waiting like this is all some huge joke.

"You told me not to talk," I murmur faintly, words coming from my cracked, dry lips like a dying breath of air.

He grins and rolls his eyes, and then he sighs again. "Ahh, 'Melia," he says. His hand rests uncomfortably on my knee. My nylons are long gone, shredded and useless. I can't even remember when he took them off.

He runs his hot, seeking hand up my thigh. Slow, strangely gentle. Like he's savoring it. His palm is slightly moist, but his fingers are dry.

"Been a while," he says again. "I want it to be good." A tear slips out from under my eyelid, remembering that last, frenzied quickie in the alley behind the gas station, sliding to the ground in a hot heap and feeling each other's heartbeat for a few minutes before zipping up our pants and spray-painting the wall. Two days later, his "death" made the local evening news. I stayed in my room for a week. I never came out, the whole time. My mother brought me my meals and left them outside the door. She knew something about grief.

My words are a weak whisper. "I wanted to die, after you did. I tried, once, to cut my wrists, but I couldn't do it."

He seems rather unmoved by this. "Huh," he says. He starts unbuckling his pants. A sick, hot lump comes up in my throat, and I want to spit on him.

_Fuck you, Johnny,_ I think. _Fuck you._

"Sorry, sweet-heart," he says. "Fortunes of war." What the hell is he talking about?

It doesn't matter. With Johnny, nothing ever matters.

My panties are down around my calves. They're nothing fancy. Some cheapo Fruit-of-the-Loom variety. I'm on a budget. The bra, incidentally, was not expensive.

"Take me as I am, take me as I come," he says, and shoves himself forward violently. "Oh, _yeah,_" he sighs. "That's the good stuff."

His brutal entry is shocking, painful, even. Still, the old memories of him still cling. Faded remnants that my body recognizes, even if my brain refuses to accept them. Memories of that last quickie from ten years back brought on a totally unbidden trickle of remembered arousal, like a watering mouth. The scant wetness makes his frenzied thrusts a little easier to handle, if not stomach entirely.

I almost wish this was more pleasurable, that it was something different. I wish we could have gone back to my apartment, and I could have washed the paint off his face, and we could have pretended it was the old days again. Anything but this. It's like I don't even exist except as some random figment of imagination or memory.

As though I'm not a real person at all. Just some object out of his past that he can plunder at his will.

He presses his wet, paint-smeared mouth to my neck, runs it along my jaw, some deep moan coming out of his throat. I start to cry.

"I hate you, I hate you. I love you," I choke out. "I hate you, I love you. I did. Why? Why did you have to—"

"Shut up, shut up, just shut up," he whispers, and gives a final, jerking twitch. His mouth opens, and he lets out a long breath.

"I oughta kill you," he says, panting, while he leans over me, still inside, still connected, even though it's over. "But I don't think I will."

"Thanks," I whisper sarcastically, "I appreciate it."

"Any time, sweet-heart," he says, pulling himself out of me. "Any time." He fumbles with his pants, gives them a little pat.

"You got a number I can call?" he asks rather off-handedly. "Phone number? Got an apartment number, maybe, that I can visit, come see you sometime?"

I'm tempted to say _Fuck off,_ but don't dare. "No," I say simply.

"Huh," he says. "Okay, then. Just wanted to keep in touch." He smoothes his greasy hair back with one hand. He takes his knife out again, starts fiddling with it, tossing it back and forth.

"Hope you brought a change of clothes in your car," he says, and giggles again. "Here…have the jacket. I got another one lying around." He takes it off, throws it at me. I don't want to touch anything that's his, but I have no choice.

I pull it around me, button it closed. "Purple?" I ask faintly, and he laughs again. "Purrr-ple," he says, and I don't press the issue.

"Be nice to see you again sometime," he says. He leans forward, and I finally see what's at the corners of his mouth.

"Oh, my God," I say.

"Yeah," he sighs, "the scars. Wanna know how I got 'em?" He hefts his knife.

"No," I say quickly. "Maybe…some other time."

He shrugs. "Real great story," he says rather ominously. "You sure you don't—"

"I'm sure."

He tickles my chin with the tip of the knife. "Was it good?" he asks. "Just outa curiosity."

A hot surge of anger bubbles up in my chest, but I force it down. "Yeah, Johnny," I lie through my teeth, channeling my seventeen-year-old self with all my might. "Yeah. It was good. Really good."

He smiles faintly and flicks the knife back up into his hand, where he stows it in his pocket.

"Ta-ta," he says in a deliberate, low voice, and spins around on his heel, disappearing into the darkness. After he's gone, I run as fast as I can, not stopping until I'm down two levels, until I've finally reached my car. The keys jangle and fumble in my hand, and once I'm inside, I grab a flashlight and shine it in every dark corner until I'm certain I'm safe. Then I speed out of there like a bat from hell, the tears flowing freely now, breath coming from my throat in little hitched sobs, hyperventilating, barely able to breathe. I scream a little, pound my fist on the steering wheel, almost slamming into some poor bastard in front of me. I feel like a piece of me has just been put back and torn away again, worse than before, a thousand times more painful, like one of Johnny's knives just carved out my heart, my entrails, and looped them in a bleeding line. I put my head forward on the wheel at a red light, sobbing, my mouth open in a wordless, constant moan. I can't think. I don't want to be able to feel.

When I finally reach my apartment, I lock every bolt and throw Johnny's awful purple coat in a corner, stomping on it and kicking it against the wall. Then I collapse onto my bed, not bothering to try and scrape him off me in the shower. It doesn't matter, anyway. With Johnny, nothing ever matters.

And for now, it sure seems like nothing ever will again.

* * *

**A/N: A note about his name (a bit long after the fact—I'm adding this tail-end A/N about a year-and-a-half after having originally posted the fic): I realize it's Jack in canon, but I was thinking about it one day before I had completely finished formulating the fic in my head, and the name "Johnny" just really seemed to fit Heath!Joker for some reason. Since Jack is actually a derivative of John (i.e. Jack could have been a later nickname, at least in the context of this fic, in which I dreamed up that he went by "Johnny" to his friends when he was younger) I decided to go for it. Somehow it just clicked—particularly because, unlike in the 1989 incarnation, his real name is never actually mentioned in TDK (although I realize that fans still generally accept without question that his name is Jack in this version nevertheless—kind of like how in the Phantom of the Opera fandom, the Phantom's name is Erik in canon and is generally accepted without question by fans to be his name even in versions where he isn't named—once I thought about it in **_**that**_** way, I realized I'd probably better insert something here explaining my reasons for naming the Joker the way I did. I'm a hardcore Phantom of the Opera fan (which is why thinking about this in terms of POTO finally made me do a double-take), although I'm only a casual Batman fan (watched all the live-action films, including the campy Adam West version, although I've only seen bits and pieces of the TV show; also watched a few of the cartoons when I was a kid; however, I have absolutely no experience with the actual comic book canons, and I'm not incredibly well-versed in the Batman universe at large, so forgive my fumbling—I do love the world of Batman dearly, even if I'm not a hardcore fan). **


End file.
